Exclusive Interview: Vaughters Reveals More About His Doping and The New York Times Op-Ed

In an exclusive interview, Jonathan Vaughters talks about his reasons for admitting he doped as a pro cyclist

Jonathan Vaughters, left, with Garmin's David Millar at a pre-season training camp in 2012. (Garmin-Sharp)

Last Sunday, The New York Times published an op-ed by Garmin-Sharp manager Jonathan Vaughters in which he admitted to doping during his professional cycling career. In “How to Get Doping Out of Sports,” he described his journey from idealistic junior to guilt-ridden doper, and how the experience spurred him to try to help clean up the sport.

It has, as Vaughters had hoped, gotten a reaction, which he characterizes as mostly supportive. But within the confines of the 1,300-word op-ed, it was short on specifics.

The criticism that did come focused on the scarcity of details in his admission; questioned the practicality and naiveté of the idealism that he displayed in talking about young athletes and their dreams; suggested that his admission was merely PR stagecraft in front of his possible involvement in USADA’s investigation of Lance Armstrong; and pointed out that his prescription—better anti-doping enforcement—seemed a vague platitude.

In a wide-ranging, exclusive interview with Bicycling, Vaughters addressed those comments and more fully detailed his own experiences with doping, in hopes of offering context for his op-ed. Vaughters declined to answer questions relating to his time on U.S. Postal Service or teammates, citing a wish to respect the integrity of USADA’s anti-doping process.

But his comments do address some myths, including that the open secret—Vaughters doped—pertains only to his time on Postal with Armstrong. They make clear the depth of the sport’s problems, the progress that’s been made, and why he feels only now was it possible for him to openly admit what he did.

Vaughters’ central point was never simply to get anything off his chest. He says that while finally acknowledging his past was welcome, it wasn’t cathartic in the way it was for Landis or Hamilton.

“I think a lot of people thought that it must have been a big relief, but no, it wasn’t,” he told Bicycling. “The op-ed is part of a greater process. Frankly, I won’t be happy or feel better until I see that it’s done something to change the environment.”

Vaughters’ op-ed is shot through with emotion—the idealism of his youth, the dreams he says he realized only at the cost of his moral integrity, and how that shaped his conviction to spare others the decision he faced.

It seems, at first glance, maudlin or sensationalized, especially stripped of context. Is he, as some wondered, trying to paint himself as a victim?

“Obviously, I’m not a victim,” he says. “The decision (to dope) was mine and mine alone.”

As a smart kid from an upper-middle-class suburb in the U.S., he didn’t face some of the same bleak choices that European pros did who came from harder backgrounds. But he did share something with them.

“The point of illustrating that was exactly what went on in my life and in my head,” he says. “It’s telling a story, and one that probably a lot of other athletes have.”

To understand why he told that story, perhaps it’s important to understand what pro cycling was in 1996.

An Accidental Conspiracy

In 1994 Vaughters moved to Spain to race for a new top-division team, Porcelana Santa Clara. He says he was young, idealistic, and clean. The team was a new kind of creation. Funded in a roundabout way by Opus Dei, a Catholic prelature that preaches a call to holiness in everyday life, Porcelana’s approach was markedly similar to teams like Garmin and Sky today.

“Our head director, Jose Luis Nunez, went to church four times a day,” says Vaughters. He says even as EPO was becoming epidemic in the sport, Nunez’s perspective was “‘No, we’re going to work harder than everyone else, and find all the little training methods no one has thought of, and look at nutrition,’ and so on and so forth. It was the original ‘marginal gains’ philosophy before Sky.”

The team hired a mix of young, talented riders—world track champions from Russia and Spanish amateurs who Vaughters says won multiple amateur races in Spain. He was the sole American. With the team’s talent and approach, it should have been instantly competitive. Instead, “We were the worst team in the Spanish peloton, by far,” he says.

At the start of that season, he didn’t know what EPO was, but by the next spring it was so pervasive it was openly discussed in the peloton. There was no EPO test at the time, and the UCI wouldn’t even institute a cap of 50 percent hematocrit (red blood cells as a percentage of total blood volume) until 1998.

One vivid recollection of the era for Vaughters: “I remember one Spanish rider who used to stand up and flex his muscles and say, ‘Am I really this strong? Or did the chemicals make me this way?’” All the while, Nunez held the line: no doping.

In 1996, Vaughters says his director came to the team meeting one morning at the Tour of the Basque Country, a notoriously hilly and difficult weeklong stage race in Spain, and announced that the team would try a new tactic.

“Because guys had been getting dropped one by one and were struggling to make the time cut,” says Vaughters, “now, when our first guy got in trouble, the whole team would drop back and do a team time trial at our own speed to try to catch back up to the gruppetto in the waning kilometers of the race.”

It was so thoroughly demoralizing that the team cracked. But the crack didn’t come from the riders. They weren’t paid enough to afford EPO on their own—Vaughters says his salary in 1995 was $15,000—and didn’t know how to use it even if they had gotten it.

One day, he says, Nunez came to him. Vaughters recalls the conversation as follows.

Nunez: “You know, Jonathan, I’ve been thinking about this, and we aren’t going to dope you. But we think that because you’re training so hard, that we want to make sure we keep your red-cell count the same as it was at the beginning of the season, when you came from Colorado fresh.”

Vaughters: “OK, sounds good.”

Nunez: “There’s going to be some medication that we’ll use to make sure that happens.”

Vaughters: “OK.”

“I quickly figured out he was talking about EPO,” says Vaughters today. “As much as I should’ve said no, and as much as I was intelligent and should have said, ‘Wait, this is bullshit,’ in my mind he’d just spelled out that I wasn’t going to dope; we’d just make my hematocrit what it would have been had I not been riding my bike so damn much.

“And we’re never going to use doses high enough to push where you shouldn’t be, so I shouldn’t worry about the health consequences like stroking out,” he says.

In the early ’90s, a number of young pro cyclists died of strokes in their sleep; it was thought to result when their cardiovascular systems struggled to push EPO-thickened blood at low resting heart rates.

“And of course there’s no testing positive,” Vaughters says. “So it was like, ‘Well, my blood’s going to have the same thickness as it normally does, so we’re just avoiding anemia, right? So this is actually healthy!’”

I ask Vaughters if he consciously realized those rationalizations at the time.

“Of course I can look back now and see that,” he says. “But at that point in time, I was ripe soil. When you’re time trialing off the back to make the gruppetto in every race, your mind is fertile for hearing that.”

Whatever his own mental gymnastics, he can’t begin to imagine how Nunez got there.

“Here’s a guy who talked to God every two hours and somehow rationalized it,” says Vaughters. “He was the most idealistic person in the world. He founded a team on the principles of clean racing and how to make up the difference through marginal gains and hire the most talented young athletes and that little by little the sport could be moved and changed.”

He stops for a moment and then leans forward, punctuating his words by pounding his fist gently on the table: “Jose Luis Nunez had the same damn dream and the same damn conviction I did. But his timing was incredibly bad. He held out for 30 months of his dream and then he cracked. And the athletes, once he cracked, the dam broke.”

It’s easy to feel bad for Vaughters and for Nunez. But on the other hand, they were rational adults who made those decisions. They aren’t really victims. But who is? And where do we affix the blame? That’s an understandable but misplaced focus, says Vaughters.

More important is to recognize that oxygen-vector doping like EPO was devastatingly effective and that the so-called EPO generation of pro cycling was a perfect confluence—an accidental conspiracy of modern medical science combined with a slow reaction by authorities and natural human ambition.

“Over the course of sports, at any time there is the desire to cheat, but there are times at which a certain drug exists which is undetectable and so effective that it becomes very difficult to be competitive without it,” he says.

A Forever-Tilted Playing Field

Once such a drug becomes available, is it possible to stop its advance? Is it even wise? A number of commentators say either that the fight against doping is a hopeless facade, as doping expert Charles Yesalis said recently, or even misguided, a tremendous waste of resources and time. Why not let athletes do what they want? At least then we’d have the clarity of knowing it’s a level playing field.

Vaughters visibly bristles when I ask this. Then he lays out what he has for countless journalists and fans (he’s been known to give out his mobile-phone number on Twitter so that he can talk to people about what he sees as misperceptions).

“There are a few arguments on that. I’ll start with physiological and we’ll go to psychological,” he begins.

Take two riders of the same age, height, and weight, says Vaughters. They have identical VO2max at threshold—a measure of oxygen uptake at the limit of sustainable aerobic power. But one of them has a natural hematocrit of 36 and one of 47. Those riders have physiologies that don’t respond equally to doping.

It’s not even a simple math equation that, with the old 50 percent hematocrit limit, one rider could gain 14 percent and another only three. Even if you raise the limit to the edge of physical sustainability, 60 percent or more, to allow both athletes significant gains, it’s not an equal effect, Vaughters says.

He goes on to explain that the largest gains in oxygen transport occur in the lower hematocrit ranges—a 50 percent increase in RBC count is not a linear 50 percent increase in oxygen transport capability. The rider with the lower hematocrit is actually extremely efficient at scavenging oxygen from what little hemoglobin that he has, comparatively. So when you boost his red-cell count, he goes a lot faster. The rider at 47 is less efficient, so a boost has less effect.

“You have guys who train the same and are very disciplined athletes, and are even physiologically the same, but one has a quirk that’s very adaptable to the drug du jour,” Vaughters says. “Then all of a sudden your race winner is determined not by some kind of Darwinian selection of who is the strongest and fittest, but whose physiology happened to be most compatible with the drug, or to having 50 different things in him.”

It’s basically a Darwinian selection based adaptations to modern pharmacology. On the psychological side, Vaughters says that the playing field becomes tilted even among dopers because not everyone dopes to the same degree.

“If you make everything legal, believe me, some people are going to push things way beyond where they are now,” he argues. “Some people will say no to what is essentially suicide, so the winner is the guy who’s willing to risk his health more than anyone else.”

Vaughters stresses that this is a practical opposition to allowing doping. “It’s not that my holier-than-thou position leads me to believe that pureness is the way forward,” he says. “Logic leads me to that conclusion. If you’re looking to find the best athlete who can win because he works the hardest and is the most talented and has good tactics and all that, then the path of opening doping is not a plausible one to end up at that objective.”

So if we can’t allow doping in sport, how do we get it out? Or can we?

Clean Enough

In 1995, Vaughters spent almost a third of his salary on an SRM power meter, explaining: “If I train with these scientific methods, I can overcome the advantage of doping. And what I learned was that you actually can overcome quite a bit of the advantage with the marginal gains and correct training approach. But there is a limit.”

In the 1990s, without effective testing, it was impossible to make up all the difference to a rider who was physiologically well suited to doping and willing to do it. Marginal gains became irrelevant. But today, says Vaughters, you can. And one reason is the so-called bio-passport, or biological passport.

Because the passport program tests not for doping substances but instead monitors an athlete’s hematological baselines, it’s sensitive to changes that could mean blood doping, by any means.

Says Vaughters: “People today look at the sport and say, ‘There could still be doping.’ And yes, there could be. And is the biological passport flawless? No, it’s not. But what it does effectively do is tie things down so that the gains that can be made doping today are so small that you can overcome it with marginal gains—with better skinsuits and nutrition and this, that, and the other.

But back in the ’90s, says Vaughters, pro riders who doped were regularly getting leaps in performance that were far from marginal. “A 20 percent power gain! Good climbers in the peloton produced 5.5 to 6 watts per kilogram at threshold. Same as today. The guy at 5.5—the worst climber of this group—goes up 20 percent at threshold—he’s now at 6.3 or 6.4 watts per kilo. So he’s leap-frogged the most talented climber. And the guy at 6 goes to 7, and all of a sudden the mediocre climbers at 6.25 and the good ones at 7, well, where’s the guy who was at 5.5 who didn’t use EPO? Who’s actually a damn talented athlete. He’s in the grupetto. So when the gains are that huge, all of a sudden marginal gains become irrelevant.

“That was ludicrous in the ’90s,” says Vaughters. “You have a better skinsuit. Great, good job. You got one percent (improvement). That guy got 20. Bravo.”

Is that the best we can hope for, then, clean enough? Yes, says Vaughters. And what’s more, we should stop pushing for this fabled, perfectly clean ideal, because it’s just that: a fable.

“If the most talented rider on the best team with the best tactics can win and does often win, then we’re there,” he says of what he views as the goal. “The black-and-white approach, quite frankly, hasn’t worked. Perfect doesn’t exist in the universe, in the human condition. So of course we’re shooting for the best possible.”

How do we get there? In his op-ed, Vaughters called for better anti-doping enforcement. I ask what he meant by that.

“Money,” he says. Money funds better testing, and research for better tests, so that anti-doping authorities can keep up with advances in cheating.

“Everyone bitches and moans that anti-doping costs a lot, but teams fund most of it,” he says. “And as the president of the teams’ union, I feel we need more funding. Race organizers are the most profitable entity in the sport, but ASO puts less than 1 percent of its profits to anti-doping.”

Even though teams do fund most anti-doping, they’re resistant to paying more, too. But to hear Vaughters tell it, the obstacle isn’t the cost alone, or even the specter that with more testing comes more positives and, in the short term, more pain.

The problem is trust.

“When I go to the other team managers and say we should put in more money, I almost get spit in the face,” he says. “They’re like, ‘Fuck that. Why would I put in more money to an organization that only seeks to hurt my team?’”

That organization is the UCI, which in addition to licensing races and racers, administers almost all anti-doping tests in the sport, is responsible for results management, and runs the bio-passport program. The problems are two-fold. First, there’s little to no oversight of the UCI, which leads to charges of corruption.

“I honestly don’t know what to think about that,” says Vaughters when I ask if the corruption allegation is legitimate. “But I do know that if you want to prevent criticism, you move ultimate power to a third party and it eliminates that possibility. Why would you want to have that criticism?”

More prosaically, the teams (and race organizers) don’t trust the UCI because they feel the organization is working against them—imposing sponsor-unfriendly regulations, and forcing teams to spend money and extend the season to do races the UCI itself organizes and makes money off of, like the Tour of Beijing, which compete with independent events.

“There are conflicts of interest that need to be resolved,” says Vaughters. “I think every team in cycling would be willing to double their contribution and the race promoters would too, if they absolutely trusted the process.”

Right now, they don’t. And the way the sport is set up—with teams vying for riders who win valuable points that are used to set team rankings—which in turn governs which teams get automatic entry to all-important races like the Tour de France, Vaughters sees a dangerous echo of the past.

Tension Mounts

When Vaughters signed with the Credit Agricole team for 2001, he says manager Roger Legeay had a message for him that he hadn’t heard since 1995. Legeay sat him down and told him this, says Vaughters: “Listen, we can never, ever have a doping scandal on this team. It will crush us. So I will pay you as if you won the Tour de France if you get top 10 in the Tour.”

It was an encouraging message; there would be no call to dope from within the team, no pressure to win at all costs. At the same time, there had been advances in the sport—passport-style longitudinal testing on the French teams, the EPO test—that were cause for hope that things would improve and you could race clean.

But over time the hope never materialized, Vaughters says. Longitudinal testing fizzled. Riders beat the tests. And Legeay, who had put together a talented team, struggled to keep Credit Agricole ranked among the first-division teams, which, as today, were ordered based on points won during the season.

A first-division license meant an almost-certain Tour berth. Without it, Legeay would have to hope for a wildcard entry, a level of uncertainty that wouldn’t please the sponsor.

The importance of the Tour de France to teams and their sponsors, especially to French teams, is hard to overstate. In 2011, Europcar expected 500 French radio and TV mentions of the brand during the entire race. “It busted the quota in two days,” company spokeswoman Marine Boulot told The Wall Street Journal.

Back in 2002, Credit Agricole was struggling competitively despite a roster that included riders such as Jens Voigt, Thor Hushovd, and Christophe Moreau. Vaughters clearly saw the stress on Legeay. “I could see the sweat beads on his forehead,” Vaughters says. “He was getting concerned for his organization.”

Legeay would never dope his riders, never even ask them to dope. He was so careful that in 2001 he wouldn’t even allow team doctors to get a therapeutic-use exemption for cortisone to treat swelling when a wasp stung Vaughters on the face at the Tour de France.

But in 2002 the danger was that the entire team might not make the race the next year if they didn’t get results. Although Vaughters had a contract and wasn’t in danger of getting fired, he wanted to help the team.

“So I was in a place where I was prepared to start doping again,” he says. “I knew by doping I would disappoint Roger, but by doing poorly I would also disappoint Roger.”

No Hero, No Victim

He went back and forth in his head thousands of times about doping. “It’s ‘Should I?– Shouldn’t I?–Should I?–Shouldn’t I?” he says. “Sometimes the answer was ‘I shouldn’t’ and sometimes it was ‘I should.’ Then the EPO test comes along and it’s like, “I shouldn’t,” because this will clean things up.’ And then, ‘Wait a minute. Everyone is somehow getting around this test.’

“I quit because I was just so tormented I couldn’t deal with it,” he says. “That doesn’t mean I have a halo. It finally got to the point that the tension and pressure of trying to create a new career from nothing, with no college degree, of saying, ‘I have no skills, but somehow I’ll figure out how to make a living and support my family’ was less than having a secure job paying hundreds of thousands of dollars but this weird torment of the decision hanging over you. I quit because of that decision.”

But not before doping one last time.

In spring of 2002, Vaughters began to use EPO again—on his own, without the aid of a doctor in or outside of the team. He told no one, and was terrified. He knew that injecting intravenously caused it to clear faster than the old subcutaneous method, but the doses used in cycling are so tiny that if you missed a vein “you wouldn’t even know, until boom (positive test). Oh shit.”

He got a quarter of the way into his pre-Tour doping regimen and stopped.

“I just … can’t … DO this anymore,” he thought. There was no moral victory, just the relief that the tension was gone.

He went back to the U.S. and raced half a season in 2003 for Prime Alliance. He’d show up at local training races and was shocked to see people having fun. “I had no idea it was enjoyable for anyone,” he says. “I’m so happy I did that half year as a pseudo pro. Because I realized it was fun again.”

And so he started a junior team in 2004, not really thinking out the potential long-term consequences of encouraging kids to race bikes. “I just enjoyed watching them progress and win races,” he says. But a couple of the kids on the team were pretty good. And as they progressed, Vaughters says it hit him.

"I was like, 'Oh my Lord. I brought these kids into this. I'd better damn well do everything I can, start stepping out there and being vocal and doing everything in my power to prevent them from being put in that situation.'"

That’s when Slipstream began to be consciously positioned as a clean team. He even sat a few of the kids down to tell them, in no uncertain terms, what the top pro version of the sport was like.

“I’m an eternal optimist, so I would also tell them, ‘Don’t worry! By the time you get there this will be fixed,” even though he had no clear idea how to make that happen.

Two of the kids on that 2004 TIAA-CREF/5280 team were Alex Howes and Peter Stetina, both of whom will race for Garmin in the upcoming USA Pro Challenge. A third, Timmy Duggan, will ride for Liquigas-Cannondale. A fourth, Craig Lewis, will co-captain Champion System.

If those riders gave Vaughters the clarity to use his experiences to change the sport, then he credits others for the opportunity.

An Opening

In May 2006, Spanish police arrested Liberty Seguros director Manolo Saiz and four others, including doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, accusing them of running a sport-wide doping ring that involved dozens of pro cyclists, including American Tyler Hamilton, who’d previously tested positive for blood doping.

A little over two months later, Floyd Landis became the first Tour de France winner in history to test positive and lose his title.

Although Hamilton and Landis initially denied doping, and even mounted extraordinary, vehement defenses in their doping cases, both eventually admitted that they had doped.

Vaughters credits those admissions—and many others, like Bjarne Riis and Jorg Jaksche—with clearing the way for his own.

“The op-ed I wrote and the impact I feel it’s having, I don’t know if that would be possible without those people,” says Vaughters. “I’d say it probably wasn’t.”

Another way to read that is that Vaughters sat back and let others be sacrificed for his sins. Hamilton and Landis made their own decisions to spend their fortunes fighting the charges, but both of them were essentially ruined by not only their own choices but how the sport treated them afterward.

Vaughters readily agrees that the punishments and reaction for those who came before him was overly harsh. But he rejects the idea that he somehow timed his admission to minimize the damage or get out in front of the USADA investigation, for which he may be called as a witness.

“Five years ago, when someone would step forward and say, ‘Yeah, I doped,’ the reaction to that individual was amazingly negative,” he says of the time when ex-riders like Frankie Andreu made their admissions. “And basically, that person, in whatever capacity they might have had to improve the overall situation by being honest, they were immediately pushed aside. That is very dissuasive to coming forward.”

Betsy Andreu told Bicycling that Vaughters was The New York Times’ anonymous second confessor and that she appreciated his willingness not to leave her husband completely isolated, even though Vaughters remained anonymous.

When asked if he was the anonymous teammate, Vaughters declines to comment, citing the USADA investigation, but he adds: “I’m glad that Frankie wasn’t left to twist in the wind completely alone.

“It took until 2008 until I felt the time was right and the sport was ready to have a team that was outspoken about anti-doping, and it took until now for my admission to have a positive impact on the sport as opposed to a negative one.”

I point out that another interpretation is that he bided his time and built himself into a central power in the sport, someone who was politically untouchable.

“Actually, I risk more now than at any other point,” he says. “If the negative reaction was there, I could lose sponsors, I could collapse my whole team. If I’d admitted in 2004, what would I have risked? There was basically no team. I was retired, working as a real estate agent. There was basically no risk. But what’s the impact? In 2004, it would have been zero.”

Some of that potential negative effect has been blunted by the fact that his doping is an open secret. For roughly the past decade, Vaughters says, anyone who asked him privately whether he doped got a straight answer.

In interviews, he’s sidestepped the issue, talking in shaded terms about wanting his athletes not to face the choice he made, or of not being proud of what should have been a huge accomplishment, winning a stage of the Dauphine and setting a new record for the fastest ascent of Mont Ventoux.

That leads to criticism that Vaughters has never essentially had any punishment for his doping. So how does the sport exact justice from Vaughters? Does he give back his wins? His prize money?

“Sure,” he replies. “I don’t need that (record). But who do I give the prize money to?” He says he’d prefer to somehow donate it to anti-doping efforts.

Take that Ventoux record. Vaughters doesn’t hold it anymore. Iban Mayo does—a Spanish racer who tested positive for EPO in the 2007 Tour de France. But Vaughters can’t claim it. So it goes to Marco Pantani, who died in 2004 from a cocaine overdose and was continually linked to doping for much of his career. Who held it before Pantani? I looked for the answer but couldn’t find it. Perhaps we go all the way back to the original record-holder, Charly Gaul, in 1958.

Therein lies the sport’s problem. Back in “the ’60s,” as Vaughters and others refer to the EPO era, referencing the hematocrits some riders achieved, doping was so widespread that there are simply too many bodies buried to cleanly go through and re-award wins and prize money. Some of those people are now in positions of power in the sport, like Riis and Vaughters.

Since the 1998 Festina scandal (and likely before) there has been a tremendous resistance to uncovering the sport’s past. Do we need to? Is it possible to simply draw a line and forget what came before, to start anew without some kind of mass confession?

Vaughters doesn’t believe it’s possible. “You’re two thirds of the way through a dark tunnel; backing up is not an option,” he says, citing the scandals, positive tests, and many admissions so far.

Despite his prominence on the topic, he does not enjoy talking about doping again and again. “This is not a pleasure for me,” he says. “I want my job to be focused on finding the next Andrew Talansky.”

But he’s one of the few willing to talk about it, because he feels it’s important. “The fact is that right now it’s in the public forum and, for those of us in the sport, you deal with it honestly and transparently. Or else, it just drags on.”

Recently it’s become fashionable to suggest that a good way to deal with doping would be a so-called truth and reconciliation commission, modeled on the original one used to investigate crimes and abuses in apartheid-era South Africa. Vaughters thinks it’s an excellent idea. Where he gets bogged down is the same area where the original commission faced criticism: How do you decide what’s too heinous to let pass? And who decides?

“You have to treat people fairly,” he begins before conceding that it is tricky to define. “There are certain people in cycling who are not only looking to ‘tread water’ but are actively pushing and looking for something more. And those people are very often not athletes, but they’re managers or doctors.

“You have young men who are impressionable and ambitious and in love with their sport. They’ll do anything to win a race in front of their mom. And these older people, in a position of power, how they mentor that athlete makes a big difference. Imagine the outcry if I was steering athletes to dope. If that happened, is that the athlete’s fault? Maybe. But it sure as shit is my fault!”

That history is a huge problem, and a sad one. In many ways it represents the sport’s past, not its present or future. In his op-ed, Vaughters writes that “the rules must be enforced, and the painful effort to make that happen must be unending and ruthless.”

His hope, he says, is that things keep getting a bit better all the time. And they have, he says, gotten much better. He cites figures from the UCI that show that the blood values for the pro peloton on average—the 800-plus pros on WorldTour and Pro Continental teams—have decreased over the years.

Hematocrit, hemoglobin, and OFF-score (a measure of new red-cell creation that can be linked to EPO use) have all declined as new advances in anti-doping are made. He professes to be mystified by why the UCI hasn’t used those figures to talk about the success of anti-doping, but then concedes that much depends on the messenger. “Who from cycling does the public trust to present the data?” he asks. “It has to come from someone people trust or they won’t believe it.”

Vaughters envisions that someday, maybe 10 years from now, enough time will have passed that cycling will not only still be mostly clean but also that some of the old stories will fade, and old personalities will fade out.

He says the sport has to keep fighting, that if we relax, there’s a risk of sliding back into the chaos that he wants to leave behind. But for now, he takes solace in an achievement that once looked so remote as to be impossible.

Whatever the sport’s faults are, he says Ryder Hesjedal won the Giro d’Italia clean, and it was able to do so because of the crimes—and sacrifices—of those who came before.

In his op-ed, Vaughters spoke wistfully of dreams—of his own as a junior, of realizing them only at the cost of his integrity, and of his wish to spare his athletes from facing that choice. He smiles and remembers the old visionary team director whose ideas came too soon. “The improvements we’ve made, we’re so far there,” he says. “It’s not perfect, but the decision of ‘dope or get out,’ that’s not there anymore.

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